


Man-Eating Beasts and Where to Find Them

by apparentlytaboo



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood and Gore, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Hunters & Hunting, M/M, Monsters, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Protective Natasha Romanov, Vampire Bucky Barnes, Werewolf Clint Barton, WinterHawk Bingo 2019, man-eating beasts, winterhawk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2020-08-19 16:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparentlytaboo/pseuds/apparentlytaboo
Summary: "Clint sits before him, bare hands wrapped around a steaming mug, the small smile still lighting his face as he patiently watches Bucky come back to himself. There’s a very large bowl between them, coated in viscous red and held aloft by Bucky’s fingertips. He spares a long second simply staring at the bowl, then at the man who just fed him a deer’s worth of blood like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Then he sets the bowl down and turns his attention to the rest of the room because his brain hasn’t recovered enough to unpack that yet."





	1. Chapter 1

The familiar syrup-thick texture coats the insides of his teeth, lays heavy on his tongue, and for a moment he is filled with blind panic before a wave of relief too strong to stifle washes over his senses and overpowers his reluctance; the repugnance of the flavor barely registers as his throat works to take the liquid down in one huge continuous gulp and when it’s gone he goes still, motionless to a degree that only his kind can achieve. Painstakingly slowly, the lifeblood spreads out from his core, radiating through his leaden limbs and chasing off the lethargy that’s been plaguing his body for weeks now. Awareness comes slower, heat pricking his skin; the left side hot like the sun or perhaps a furnace, a milder warmth pervading from directly before him. With an effort his senses focus in the direction of the blaze, the white noise in his ears resolving into the crackles and pops of burning wood, but it is impossible to stay focused on the fire once the double rhythm of a pair of living hearts beats its way into his perception. He’s not alone in the room. Which makes it incredibly likely that the man from the woods was indeed real, instead of the mirage Bucky half hoped had been drummed up by his hunger. Blurry snatches of dreamlike imagery pass before his eyelids as his sharpening mind ravages through his memories of the morning.

There had been a man in the woods. And a deer, his, dead before he reached it. Eyes bluer than anything Bucky had ever seen dancing beneath the shifting shadow of the trees. A searing grip, an invitation; the internal war between his desperation to slake his thirst and his self-control had drowned out most everything else.

Finally, he eases the death grip paralyzing his body and takes a tentative breath. Blood dominates the scent-scene, thick and cloying as it fills his nose and his mouth waters again despite the heady notes of game marking it as animal. Beneath the onslaught, he can make out wood smoke, freshly disturbed earth, old meals, soap and mild chemicals; the tell-tale signs of human living. He smells an animal, a dog, and then what is unmistakably the man; there’s the scent of the forest and detergent clinging to clothing, dried sweat and the musky tang of a living thing’s exertion, and beneath it all the unique richness of his blood, earthy and warm and calling Bucky like the sweetest song. Bucky clamps down on the familiar reactions, body shaking slightly with the effort of repression as he breathes again, long and deep and torturous, savoring the smell of this thing he wants so very badly and placing it, decisively, in the realm of things he will never allow himself to have. His bloodlust fights him, enlists his memory to drown him in the feeling of hot liquid spilling over his fangs, the slight pressure and quiet tear as flesh gives way beneath him, the desperation of grasping hands and flailing limbs, pleading words in more languages than he can remember, culminating in the futile struggle of a life already lost…

He remembers.

He _wants_.

He shudders.

He locks the desire in a corner of his mind, and breathes the air full of promises of ecstasy, and resists, and feels like a drowning man just beneath the surface intentionally taking in great gulps of water instead of air. Slowly the shaking recedes, and Bucky’s form resolves itself back into stillness, with the addition of his breaths, and, steeling himself, he opens his eyes.

***

The Midwest is beautiful this time of year: the last tendrils of winter’s grasp are slowly receding from the forests and life, ever resilient, is breaking its way through the final frost. The morning light is mellow, filtering through broken clouds and the thickening canopy of a forest preparing for springtime; the air is crisp and clean and free of the tell-tale traces of humanity. Bucky takes a deep breath, tasting the forest on his tongue and wishing he had the capacity to enjoy it.

Bucky is starving. Not that he isn’t always starving, but today the statement is uncomfortably close to becoming true. It has been a month since he caught big game (the primary reason Nat had moved them from their cozy spot in a rundown cottage in Wisconsin, finally bullying him to a slightly warmer climate). He’s managed a handful of smaller animals during the trip southward, but he hardly noticed the difference; small game nothing more than a drop in the endless ocean of his thirst. His limbs are leaden, exhausted and shaky as he trudges silently though the brush. If he can’t catch something substantial soon, he won’t be strong enough to hunt for himself, and then Nat will be forced to intervene, and he really doesn’t want that.

Human blood is like heroine. One taste and you can’t understand why you would drink anything else, why you would ever deny yourself; you feel amazingly healthy, almost god-like… for a while. Until the high fades, and your hunger returns, and you want more, more more _more_… The last time Bucky failed to eat they’d still been in Russia; she’d broken into a blood bank and practically force-fed him. It was not a pleasant experience for either of them, and resisting the bloodlust afterwards had been hell, but she’d done what she had to in order to save his ‘life.’

He’d sworn not to put her through that again. He’d sworn not to put himself through that again. He needs to find food.

He’s shuffling along a game trail like the walking corpse he is when he spots it through foggy vision; a deer reaching down to eat the tufts of grass just poking through the snow. He feels himself freeze as his vision struggles to sharpen, his world narrowing down to life and blood and hunger, body unnaturally still without breath or heart; a coiled serpent preparing to strike and then… He’s not as fast as he could be, famished as he is, but even slowed by hunger Bucky is faster than a sprinting deer; he is a ghost, a whisper of wind as the forest blurs around him. Every fiber of his being is singing with the promise of food. He’s less than a tree away when he hears it; a _twang _followed by a faint whistling, the wet thump of a projectile rending into flesh and the deer drops. He screams to a halt, feet kicking up ruts of fresh loam as he counts one beat, two, a stutter and then… nothing. He’s frozen, too stunned to move as he watches the deer go still, his mind struggling to grasp the situation, the promise of relief just within his grasp only to be torn away...

His brain is struggling to tick over, sputtering like an engine running on fumes and beginning to flame out. The deer is dead, something hit it, the projectile had to come from somewhere, which means that Bucky is not only starving, he is likely not alone. Finally, he shakes himself, looking up across a small clearing and tracing the trajectory to... a man.

The hunter is slowly lowering his bow with a faint smile on his face as he watches his clean kill. Bucky’s heart is motionless, but he still feels the phantom sensation of it seizing in panic. This is the closest he’s been to a human he hasn’t intended to kill since crossing the Atlantic, and starved as he is, Bucky doesn’t trust his willpower to keep him away from the promise of ecstasy thrumming beneath living skin. He seems to feel Bucky’s eyes on him, tensing slightly and scanning the area immediately surrounding the carcass, going still the moment his eyes land on Bucky. For a strange moment, neither one moves, but the stranger’s eyes seem to be everywhere at once; darting from Bucky, to the deer, the surrounding woods, back to flicker over Bucky’s form (his tattered jeans and worn t-shirt offering far too little protection from the elements for a human in the cold morning). Bucky can’t imagine what he must look like, standing there ready to pounce on a deer with his bare hands. Then the human’s striding over, long legs carrying him quickly forward, feet sure despite the gnarled roots and thick underbrush, and Bucky’s struggling mind attempts to engage.

He should leave. He needs to leave. He’s too hungry to deal with this, hasn’t been near a human in months and he is _starving_. He begs his legs to move, turn, run away, but his senses are fixated on this man, swiftly coming closer, and the only part of his body responding to his desperate requests are his lungs slamming a padlock onto his unnecessary impulse to inhale. If he catches wind of the man’s blood… Bucky’s no saint, he harbors no illusions that he’d be able to avoid slaughtering him on the spot.

Either the hunger is warping his sense of time, or the guy’s remarkably fast, already standing on the other side of the deer and reaching up to tug at the thick scarf bundled around his neck. The faint smile has yet to fade and Bucky can’t help but stare at the rest of what’s revealed; it’s a face made for smiling. He has permanent creases in the corners of his mouth from it, small wrinkles joining them at the corner of vividly blue eyes.

“Sorry” the man says, and Bucky is still frozen, the undead response to a surprise that replaces a human’s tendency to jump. The man just stands there, matching Bucky’s stare and raising an eyebrow when the silence continues to stretch without any indication of breaking. “Sorry, for stealing your kill, I didn’t see you there.” And no human eyes would have, moving as fast as he’d been. “I’m Clint,” the man continues despite Bucky’s unresponsiveness, extending a gloved hand over the corpse laying between their feet, and Bucky startles at that. Humans have a better set of animal instincts than most of them would be comfortable knowing; typically, those buried instincts react to the predator crawling beneath Bucky’s skin and calling for their blood. This guy seems completely unconcerned, perhaps bordering on comfortable, and Bucky is baffled.

The hand hangs in the air, unmoving. Heat like a searing lance radiates through Bucky’s palm and he realizes belatedly that he has moved, taken the proffered hand in his own, and he diverts every ounce of spare brainpower towards keeping the grip light, not tearing the man’s arm from its socket when he shakes it. Convincing himself to let go takes a herculean effort. The residual warmth is like a phantom ache radiating through his arm and he nonetheless misses the contact immediately (the dead have a habit of craving what is lost to them, such as the warmth of a living body). A rough scratch that might be a parody of his own voice says “Bucky,” and the man is smiling fully now, the lines deepening in his face, blue eyes sparkling like the surface of a moving stream with the light of it.

“Nice to meet you, Bucky,” he says simply, shouldering his bow and crouching down to rip the arrow from the deer’s heart. Droplets of blood spatter the snow and catch his gaze and he stare, entranced, as Clint carefully cleans the arrow before returning it to his quiver. Fighting the instinctual need to taste the blood on the air is causing cramps, similar to what it feels like to run out of air the way he remembers form his years among the living. Wiping the stray smears from his gloves onto the snow, Clint reaches down to gather the deer’s legs into his hands and without preamble, hauls the entire thing onto his shoulders as a Shepperd might carry a baby goat. The casual display of strength is enough to pull his attention away from the bloody snow. The deer outweighs the man, must. And yet he’s already striding away, carrying he massive creature as though it weights nothing at all, seemingly completely unconcerned at having _Bucky_ behind him. In his blind spot no less.

A few steps away the man pauses, turning back to meet Bucky’s eyes and make a beckoning motion with one hand, “come on, I owe you lunch” and then he’s off again, seemingly sure that Bucky will just… follow. Bucky has no idea what to make of this, of the morning, the man, the invitation. He picks his jaw up off the forest floor and follows like a sleepwalker, starved and bewildered, half convinced he is hallucinating; he wonders if his hunger-addled brain can go hypoxic.

The cottage they come upon is modest, settled deep in the woodlands and not connected to the roads by anything more than a dirt trail. Two tire tracks in the muddy snow are the only visible sign that the old pickup sitting under the modified lean-to slash garage has ever moved. Clint takes the deer over to a large rack and hauls it over his head, again without any apparent effort, dangling the thing by the hind legs and holding it above the level of his shoulders. The moment adds itself to the pile slowly growing at the back of his mind, of small things that register as _wrong_, but can’t get past the fuzzy fugue of his fatigue. Clint ties off the hind legs to the top of the rack, wandering into the ‘garage’ and rummaging around until he comes clean with a bucket, stopping to wash it at a bare spigot before positioning it below the deer.

Clint pauses to admire his work, clapping his hands to shake the snow from his gloves before turning back to Bucky and motioning him towards the cottage door. He shouldn’t go, knows it in his bones, but he’s already come this far, and Bucky can’t see how much worse the situation is going to get if he goes inside. Clint hauls the door open and holds it there, motioning for Bucky to enter before him with a kind “you’re welcome inside.”

There’s an old myth about inviting vampires into your home, that it gives them power over you. It’s just that; a myth, but the invitation seems to compel Bucky forward, unsticking his legs from where they are rooted to the ground to step over the threshold into Clint’s home.

***

Clint sits before him, bare hands wrapped around a steaming mug, the small smile still lighting his face as he patiently watches Bucky come back to himself. There’s a very large bowl between them, coated in viscous red and held aloft by Bucky’s fingertips. He spares a long second simply staring at the bowl, then at the man who just fed him a deer’s worth of blood like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Then he sets the bowl down and turns his attention to the rest of the room because his brain hasn’t recovered enough to unpack that yet.

Turning, he takes in the small space. There’s a low bookshelf in the corner, covered in mismatched paperbacks and hardcovers, each well worn and bearing the creased spine of multiple read throughs. A cast iron stove sits in the center of the room past the small bed, radiating heat and a small amount of light through the grate on the front side. Wooden walls stand bare except for a handful of black and white posters, each from a classic horror film. Bucky eyes the Nosferatu staring back at him with ambivalence, the wolfman howling at the moon, Frankenstein and his Monster before a backlit castle. Similar to the walls, the floor is bare wood with a throw rug tossed here and there, a small pile of laundry by the foot of the bed and as he watches, the mound of covers on top seems to come alive; a large golden head raises lazily to fix him with a one-eyed stare, huff out a breath, and then a dog burrows back into the sheets. “Hope you don’t mind dogs,” and he doesn’t not at all, but they usually go ballistic if he gets this close.

Behind Clint is a small kitchenette, the plumping exposed under a free-standing sink, the shelves above it crammed with toiletries and cooking utensils, spices and dish soap and deodorant stuffed haphazardly together. There are far more dishes sitting dirty in the sink than clean on the drying rack next to it. The only light besides the fireplace is a lone bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, but it remains unlit. The glow from the fireplace and dim afternoon sunlight creeping in beneath drawn curtains provide more than enough illumination for Bucky, he can see well as day on an overcast and moonless night. Surprisingly, it seems to be enough for Clint, who is following the track of Bucky’s eyes with his own, occasionally shifting his gaze back to Bucky himself as if gauging his reaction to the space.

Finally, he lets his gaze land back on Clint, sitting across a small round table from him in one of three mis-matched chairs. The bundle of warming layers and hunting jacket he’d met in the woods has resolved itself into a blond man with broad shoulders, leaning lazily on his elbows in a worn thermal top and watching Bucky like he has all the time in the world, like it’s normal to have a predator at the dinner table.

Bucky considers the definition of the man’s shoulders and arms with a critical eye, thinking about the buck nearly twice the man’s size. He moves his gaze back up to his eyes, the iris almost luminous in the darkness of the cabin. Bucky’s eyes had been blue once, a long, long time ago. His mother had always told them how bright they were, how striking. But blue like Clint’s? He’s never seen a color so vivid in a human gaze. This man knew about his kind. Clint had taken a single look at Bucky, standing in the snow in a t-shirt and looking lost, and known exactly what he was. Known, and had not been afraid.

“You’re not human.” Clint takes a sip of his beverage, what smells to be tea, hides what looks to be a grimace behind it.

“Blunt” the mug makes a soft ‘plink’ noise, settling against the tabletop, “but also true.” He pauses to watch as the cover-monstrosity on the mattress thumps onto the floor, and after a bit of miserable rolling the large golden dog extricates itself from the tangle blankets and pads over to Clint, laying a massive paw on his leg before shuffling forward and attempting to clamber up into the man’s lap, despite the two of them being nearly the same size. Clint chuckles softly at its antics, patting his head and speaking to it, though presumably the words are still meant for Bucky. “This is Lucky.” He pets the flopping ears affectionately, “lost an eye and had a bit of a limp by the time I found him, but he is a damn good dog.” Said good dog is laying half in his lap now, massive head resting on the tabletop as his single eye considers Bucky.

“Hey, Lucky,” he says, immediately feeling stupid for talking to a dog, but Clint seems pleased by it.

“Like I said before, I’m Clint. Local recluse, decent hunter, and I turn into a bigger furball than this guy near the full moon.”

“Huh” is not the most intelligent answer Bucky can think of, but it’s what comes out. He’s never met a werewolf, has fought them, killed a few even, but never has he had the opportunity to speak with one. In retrospect there were signs; the strength, the eyes, but nothing unequivocally damning and Bucky’d never given much thought to what it would be like, running into other non-human entities as anything other than enemies. Not for the first time, he wonders how much of the animosity that runs between the different creatures of the night is genuine, and how much was planted in him by an organization that wanted its members to be capable of nothing but hatred. Which begs the question of how Clint had known, instantaneously, not only what Bucky was, but that he had been starving. “How did you know?”

The question startles a small laugh out of Clint, oddly similar to Lucky’s breathy huffs of air. “Really?” At Bucky’s raised eyebrow and deadpan stare, “first off, it is still winter, and you are wandering around the woods alone in a t-shirt. Also the whole” and here he raises his hands from his mug to mime claws with his hands, appearing to grasp for something. Bucky can only assume he is miming the way Bucky himself was primed to tackle the deer in the woods, though he hadn’t been making grabby motions. At least, he certainly hopes he wasn’t. “Plus, golden eyes, it’s not really a natural color, at least I’ve never seen it before. And you smell like, well…”

“A corpse?” he supplies helpfully.

“Like winter” Clint corrects.

“You’re not…?” and he doesn’t know how to end the question, gesturing vaguely between the two of them. ‘Afraid?’ He doesn’t ask.

The amount of times Clint has taken pity on him today is becoming absurd. “No. If you were a man-eater, I wouldn’t have caught you out in the woods sneaking up on unsuspecting deer. There are plenty of people wandering the streets in the city at night that are far easier game.” Bucky has to cede that point, since Nat certainly has an easier time staying fed than he does.

“Point.” The silence between them isn’t uncomfortable as Clint pets the dog behind the ears, drinks his tea. The bowl of blood sits empty between them. Bucky still can’t quite believe that this is real.

“You don’t talk much,” and Bucky looks up from where he was interpreting shapes in the drying blood to find Clint watching him.

“I don’t really go around people” and Clint nods like he understands which, being that he is a werewolf living alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a dog, he probably does. The silence between them stubbornly refuses to be anything but bewilderingly comfortable. The warmth of the cabin has permeated every inch of Bucky’s bones, and the sun has long since faded by the time Bucky finds it in himself to break this strange feeling of tranquility. Clint talked the afternoon away, unperturbed by Bucky’s silence. He now knows that Clint loves old horror movies, always hunts with a bow, has a deep love of both pizza and coffee (though the amount of pizza joints willing to deliver to the middle of nowhere are exactly zero). He knows how soft Lucky’s ears are, because at one point he wandered over to fearlessly flop his heavy head onto his leg, to Bucky’s lingering shock.

He’s putting the large bowl near the cluttered sink and trying to come up with the right words to adequately thank the man for what he’s given him this afternoon when Clint comes up behind him, the small touch to his elbow shooting up his arm like heat lightning. When he turns to Clint the carefree aloofness that has characterized him all day is nowhere to be found.

“Listen, I don’t know how long you’re planning to be around, but” he trails off, looking torn and running a hand nervously through his hair before seeming to come to some sort of decision and turning back to Bucky, looking straight down into his eyes. “There’s a pack near the city. They don’t go outside the limits very much and for the most part they only run the woods near the full. But there’s a lot of them. Be careful.”

Bucky takes that in and lets the questions it inspires pile up in the back of his mind, where he intends to let them sit unasked and unanswered. Bucky accepts the advice, nods his thanks and stops just beyond the threshold of Clint’s home. The only home he’s ever been invited into. “Thank you,” he says, meaning it, more than the simple words can convey. He gets a broad smile that banishes some of the strain talking about the pack brought into Clint’s face, followed by a sincere sounding ‘don’t mention it,’ the door closing on Clint’s friendly ‘and don’t be a stranger!’

It’s been a long time since Bucky could _feel_ the cold, but after basking in the warmth of Clint’s home and his presence all afternoon the absence of his warmth is striking.

When he gets ‘home’ Natasha’s already there, sprawled on the old mattress they lifted from the curb and stuffed into an alcove in the small cave.

They don’t sleep, but it makes a comfortable space for lounging around. She’s scrunching her nose before he’s even fully inside the cave set in the side of a cliff face. She doesn’t look up from her book, the starlight filtering through the canopy more than enough for her to read by as he takes a seat in the old armchair across the space from her. “You smell like dog” she informs him, turning a page and peering at him from the corner of her eye.

Fortunately, when he finishes telling her about his day, she’s more amused than angry at his recklessness, and when she finally sets the book aside and slides the dark glasses down her nose to look him over, a small smile turns up the side of her mouth. “You look better” she says simply, and she could be talking about the effect of having eaten but he thinks it’s more likely the smile he hasn’t quite been able to keep out of his voice or off his face while he tells her about Clint. “We could stay for a while” she offers, the closest they come to commitment these days.

Bucky thinks about the small cabin suffused with a bone-deep warmth. He thinks about a man who does not fear him, who welcomed him into his home and treated him like a person. He thinks about the unanswered questions sitting around waiting to gather dust in the corners of his mind, and wonders what it would be like to have the opportunity to answer them instead of letting them fade away, forgotten.

“Yea, for a while. I’d like that.”

-Tbc


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Weeks have passed in the happiest blur Bucky’s experienced since gaining his freedom, until the day he arrives for one of their pre-arranged hunts to find Clint acting oddly... He responds to Bucky’s greeting, smiles in response to the small twist of Bucky’s lips that springs up around Clint of its own accord but it’s not enough to dislodge the vague sense of unease telling him that something is off."

Three days later after felling a small black bear and full-out glutting himself on nearly three gallons, Bucky stops to consider the carcass laying in the crisp grass. It’s a lot of meat, some 400 pounds of bear at a guess, and to leave it on the forest floor suddenly seems wasteful. At least, that’s the excuse he gives himself before hauling it into his arms and starting off towards a small cabin in the woods.

A mile out he picks up a rhythmic thumping that resolves into the smack of an axe into wood. Just before he breaks through the final line of trees surrounding the home, he spots movement in the underbrush, followed by Lucky’s dirt-streaked head emerging from under a bush. The bark he lets out doesn’t hold any aggression, in fact he seems excited as he accelerates towards Bucky, launching himself up on hind legs to press his big paws into his chest as soon as he’s in range, whining until Bucky shifts the bulk of the bear to free up a hand and scratch the dog’s ears. Perhaps it is his association with Clint that gives the its strange lack of fear in the face of deadly animals. Bucky scratches him obediently until the dog abruptly drops away and trots off towards the side of the clearing. Despite the barking, the rhythmic thumps of the axe haven’t wavered. Lucky pauses at the break in the trees, tail wagging as he looks over his shoulder, another bark presumably beckoning him to follow.

In the clearing, Clint is indeed chopping wood, stripped down to a sleeveless shirt and sweating with the exertion despite the brisk weather. Bucky takes advantage of the moment to appreciate the play of muscle through his back and arms as they carry the large axe through practiced movements. “Hey Clint,” he calls lamely, but the man doesn’t look up. He’s clearing his throat, taking a breath to call out again when Clint pauses to reach for another log to split, and Lucky trots up to bump his head into the back of Clint’s leg to gain his attention.

“Hey buddy” he squats down, pulling Lucky into a full-body hug-pet-production that the dog clearly loves, until he barks again, tongue lolling as he stares off towards Bucky and the bear. Clint turns, clearly well versed in his dog’s methods of communication, and doesn’t quite jump when he see’s Bucky, but the eyebrows bee-lining for his hairline give away his surprise.

He has a moment to curse himself for thinking the ‘don’t be a stranger’ line was anything but a friendly ‘goodbye’ the other night before that tiny smile is growing into place on Clint’s mouth, and he stands to wipe his hands off on dirty jeans, already striding toward Bucky. “Hey, sorry if you were standing there a while.” He reaches a hand up to scratch at the back of his head, clearly embarrassed though Bucky can’t see why he should be.

“Lucky found me in the trees, and. Well. I don’t know if you eat bear but…” he shrugs, and the bear rises and falls with the easy motion despite being twice Bucky’s size and nearly dragging the ground from his shoulders.

Clint’s smile grows brighter, and the tight set of his shoulders relaxes somewhat. “You brought me dinner” he sounds pleased.

He hadn’t quite thought of it like that, but “yes.” The smile gets even wider, which Bucky didn’t think was possible given that it nearly takes up Clint’s whole face as it is, exposing an impressive set of sharp teeth. Not as sharp as his own, but obviously inhuman with his lips stretched tight over dark gums. He doesn’t quite understand why the notion of bringing Clint dinner, of his easy acceptance and genuine appreciation of the gesture, have him flustered but… if the undead could blush, Bucky would be in so much trouble. As it stands the surge of happiness he feels in response is making him almost giddy.

“Alright. Let me finish this pile and I’ll see what we can do to get him skinned and butchered. You mind stringing him up?” he gestures towards the same rack from before with the axe, and Bucky nods before Clint turns back to the wood pile. Once the bear is strung, he looks around for something to do, and with Lucky off running through the clearing after the bugs brave enough to be out in the cold, the only thing to do is sit on the porch step and watch Clint work, and quietly wonder. It is such a novelty to sit near living things and not be treated with fear. The response isn’t usually a conscious act, but animals tend to give them a wide berth and humans feel uneasy in their presence. Maybe it’s his association with another supernatural creature that allows Lucky to bypass the instinct.

With Clint, though, he isn’t sure. Werewolves and the undead have never really gotten on, or so the stories go. Bucky can’t say that he’s ever had the chance to interact with one outside of a fight before, but the same can be said for his experience with all forms of life since his death. The ones who changed him did so for a purpose; to make him into a tool, a deadly instrument of their enemy’s destruction. Not a lot of opportunity to get to know people in that line of work. This particular werewolf has been nothing but kind to him, so it stands to reason that just like human beings and the undead, they are made up of a spectrum of both shitty people and good people. Clint appears to be one of the latter, despite how hard life likely is for him.

Werewolves have excellent hearing, above and beyond that of their human or animal counterparts; Clint should have been able to hear him coming from at least a quarter mile, let alone calling his name from twenty feet away and now that he is looking for it there are scars running up both sides of Clint’s neck into his hairline. His ears are in worse shape than the skin beneath them, small chunks missing from the cartilage in places and thick swathes of scar tissue deforming others. He has so many questions, what happened, why he lives alone out here if there’s a pack just to the south, but he doesn’t want to push Clint’s hospitality. He’s more than content to help stack the split wood, leaning over Clint’s shoulder and handing him a knife here, holding a flap of skin there, listening to the seemingly endless rumble of game-butchering facts and tips as Clint works.

Bucky stokes the fire once the bear has been reduced to a pile of meat and bones and watches Clint set up a metal contraption around an outdoor cookfire to smoke most of the meat. He takes a particularly large cut and drops it in a hot cast iron, flipping it too fast to do more than sear the outer layer.

“Coming in?” Clint asks from the door, holding it open with his free hand, keeping his plate high in the other to keep it out of Lucky’s reach as he winds in and out of Clint’s legs.

He shouldn’t. But he wants to. “Yea, ‘course.” He sets the table, offers Bucky a cup of tea which he accepts, just to have something to occupy his hands. Clint hands the steaming mug over carefully, keeping his fingers to the handle, and Bucky wraps his hands around the scalding warmth, unfazed. Aside from raging fires, there isn’t much around that can burn him anymore.

“So,” Clint starts slicing into his raw-but-seared-on-the-outside bear steak, “enjoying Waverly so far?” he asks, the first massive bite disappearing past his lips immediately followed by a deep rumble of appreciation. The second bite goes to Lucky, who takes the morsel right off the end of the fork. Clint’s eyes are drifting from his food to Bucky’s face, obviously trying not to miss his words.

“The weather’s nice” he starts, and Clint snorts and Bucky frowns, and then Clint is choking a bit and wiping his mouth before he speaks.

“No, sorry it’s just funny. A werewolf and a vampire in a spooky cabin in the woods talking about the weather.” He can feel the corner of his mouth quirk up at that, because it is rather funny. He waits for Clint to finish another bite and look up before trying again.

“The hunting’s a lot better than it was up north.”

“You were up in the north during the heart of winter trying to survive off hunting big game?” He’s keeping a straight face, but there’s an unholy light dancing in his eyes as he says it, and it’s obvious he’s holding back laughter. “Like, the season where said animals all go south or hibernate?” The mirth is breaking through, but Bucky can’t find it in himself to even pretend to be offended. He can feel the smile bleeding into his expression in response to Clint’s and then they’re laughing. Bucky’s laugh is a quiet, hesitant thing; he laughs like he is afraid to be overheard being happy, lest something come and take the moment away from him. Clint, on the other hand, laughs in loud, deep, unattractive guffaws, completely unconcerned, and Bucky kind of loves it.

He’s wiping tears from his eyes by the time he winds down enough to ask another question. “Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?” Bucky tenses, has to remind himself for the hundredth time that he can answer questions like that; his life and past are his own and his to do with as he pleases now.

“Brooklyn” and Clint chokes around another chuckle.

“That explains it. Big Bad City Boy vs. mother nature. I’m surprised you survived.”

“Yea well. So am I.”

His questions still fester, but they are soothed for now by new knowledge; that the old truck by the cabin once belonged to Clint’s grandfather, that he was named for the man, that Lucky came dangerously close to being named ‘pizza dog’ in honor of his sharing Clint’s love or the food. Bucky even managed to share a few precious pieces of himself. Clint knows where he’s from, when he was born, that the wilderness is easier for him to tolerate because it hasn’t changed so much in 70 years.

It’s well past dark again by the time Bucky gets wary of overstaying his welcome. The solitary light still hasn’t come on and he wonders just how good Clint’s vision is compared to his own, the soft blue becoming faintly reflective in the waning light. Clint follows him to the door this time, leans on the jam while Bucky pulls his boots over his worn socks. “I’m going hunting Saturday.” He tosses out, and Bucky stares up at him from his kneeling crouch, laces in hand. “If you want to come with, if you’re still, ya’ know. Around.” And he shrugs with the shoulder not holding his weight, ‘no big deal.’

“Yea.” It’s out of his mouth before he can really process it, but that’s alright. He wants to go. And Nat had left it up to him, after all, how long they stayed.

This time the warmth lingers long after leaving the cottage, as though he’d taken a small piece of that feeling and kept it trapped behind his ribs, just for himself.

***

That night, Natasha pauses in her reading to tell him about domesticated cats, and their tendency to bring the corpses of their kills to their humans as a sign of affection. Bucky looks at her as though she has sprouted an additional head, not grasping the implication.

***

“Alright, but why a bow, specifically?” It’s the twilight hours of morning, just before the sun touches the horizon, the world still dark and mostly sleeping. Clint woke before the first birds began calling and Bucky, insomniac that he is, was already waiting outside the cabin. He has ‘aids’ in today, tiny sea-shell shaped contraptions connected to wires that can magnify ambient sounds and allow him to hear, almost as well as a human. Bucky was fascinated by them, and they lost a good ten minutes of time Clint wanted to use trekking to ‘his spot’ letting him satisfy his curiosity.

“Because I’m good with one. And it’s more personal than a rifle. Also quieter.”

“Well, yes, I get that, but what I mean is, why do you use a weapon at all? You’re more than capable of just…” once again Bucky lapses into one of his wordless hand gestures to cover for his brain not supplying the right words, and Clint somehow manages to interpret it. He’s beyond grateful: ever since the organization, he’s had these moments of just… it’s like having a clear idea of what you want to express but you don’t know how to communicate it so that someone else will understand. Natasha has learned to be patient, waiting him out sometimes for hours until he finds the right words. Clint just seems to guess.

“I don’t really change outside of the full moon. The last time I did...” His gaze grows distant and Bucky instantly regrets the question, but Clint just looks at him out of the corner of his eye, the tapetum lucidum gleaming silver in the faint light. “I have a lot of bad memories and a lot of them revolve around the wolf. I like hunting, it’s calm, and soothing, and quiet, and I’m damn good with a bow.” It’s more truth than he expected, but it just adds more fuel to the fire of Bucky’s curiosity. Still, he doesn’t ask.

“How do you hunt?” and Bucky just looks at him. “No, you don’t actually run around with the whole” *queue vague and demeaning claw hand gestures. *

“Did you or did you not eat a bear killed by my” *same ridiculous hand gestures. *

“I refuse to believe that was anything other than you being hungry out of your mind. You have a strong silent brooding stereotype thing going on that I simply won’t let you tarnish by claiming to hunt with claw-hands.” Bucky laughs, still a nearly silent affair but his face changes with it and Clint’s eyes are sparkling with more than just the starlight as he watches.

“I’m fast when I want to be. The claw hands thing may or may not happen mid-air but for the most part I sneak up and employ a flying tackle that ends with a broken neck and my fangs in a throat.” Clint is shaking his head. “What?”

“All the effort people put into those old horror films, bent on romanticizing monsters like us, and here we are throwing it all away with hearing aids, bows and arrows, and flying-tackle-claw-hands.” Bucky snorts, Clint guffaws, a colt bolts from the underbrush and Bucky laughs even harder in response to Clint’s fervent curse. “Why did I even invite you? Do you know how hard it is to move quietly when you’re fucking deaf? And here you are, to all appearance you should be silent as a ghost, no heartbeat, don’t need to breathe, but you’re out here laughing and scaring away the game. No wonder you almost starved up north.”

“I thought I almost starved because I was a city boy challenging mother nature?” he quips back, enjoying the easy back and forth of their banter, any sting the words could carry prematurely terminated by the smiles betraying them on each other’s faces.

“Alright, you know what? No more talking ‘till we’re at the spot. If we make it back to the cabin with enough food for each of us, then we get to joke around. I’m hungry.”

“Always” Bucky whispers in commiseration and the look he gets back tells him more than Clint probably intended. The bear Bucky’d brought him is nearly gone, just three days later. He can’t imagine how much food Clint has to eat to keep himself satisfied if 200 pounds of meat only lasts half a week.

This combined hunting trip is a complete disaster. Staying truly quiet for any length of time is next to impossible when there are so many things Bucky wants to ask, and for all his belly aching Clint isn’t any better. By some divine intervention, they manage to locate and successfully kill a relatively small deer. The squirrels Bucky poaches out of trees on the way back are less about the food and more proving his point about the jumping prowess Clint didn’t believe he possessed. After squirrel number four is mercilessly rent from his peaceful consumption of nuts on a tree-branch by a flying Bucky Clint admits he was wrong.

“Have you always liked hunting?” he asks, since it isn’t something Bucky grew up with, he had nothing but inherited instinct to go on.

“Yea. Mostly being out in the forest by myself when I was younger, I liked that part. The rest grew with the hunger.” Bucky nods his understanding, latching the bloodless deer onto the rack by imitating what Clint had done the day they’d met. “I guess I inherited some of it, if you believe the legends.”

“What legends?” He sits in the grass next to Clint as he works, striping the skin away with expert flicks of the knife, so practiced it barely requires his concentration.

“Native American tribes who are werewolves, they claim to have bargained with the spirits of the earth to gain the power to combat a supernatural enemy.” Bucky hasn’t heard this; his experience of America was as a living human, ignorant of the reality that existed behind the veil. After his death, the organization had kept him in Russia or Europe; he hadn’t crossed the oceans again until Natasha and himself had broken away from them. As a result, his knowledge of other creatures, even of his own kind as they existed here, was limited to nonexistent. “The enemy being you.” He supplied after reading Bucky’s lack of comprehension.

“Really?”

“Yep. That’s where the big beef between werewolves and the undead comes from, apparently. Or maybe it’s all bullshit propaganda to keep us infighting instead of questioning authority. Who knows?” He adds a dramatic eyebrow wiggle for effect, and Bucky laughs at him.

“You’re not Native American,” he observes.

“No? did the pasty white skin give it away, or was it the dashing Scandinavian good looks?” He’s joking, Bucky can tell, but he still feels the now-familiar flutter in his belly, the same unnamable embarrassment that would lead to a blush if he wasn’t cursedly (blessedly) incapable.

“Mostly it was the blond hair and blue eyes,” and if there’s a slight tremor in the undercurrent of his voice the other man doesn’t comment on it, just rolls his baby blues skywards and continues.

“According to legend, our Pack hails from the original European settler of Waverly, Frederick Cretzmeyer, a werewolf who crossed the ocean with his three daughters, each of which began a family line and pack in the area. In the old country, they worshipped a goddess named Devana, a goddess of nature and of the hunt. It is said that her most devout followers were offered a gift; the form of a perfect hunter. If the gift was accepted, then your immortal soul no longer belonged to any God but Devana, and when you die, your soul goes to the ethereal forest, where you join Devana in the great hunt for all eternity.”

The use of the word ‘our’ isn’t lost on Bucky, and he lets that sink in, watching the skin fall away from the deer with only a token resistance against the skill of Clint’s blade. He thinks of the cold, hard line his faith had drown in the sand, on one side eternal glory, on the other eternal damnation. He is unsavable at this point; an indelible stain on his immortal soul marking him as the devil’s lot, never to feel the warmth or light of God again. Against that, Clint’s version seems rather “Beautiful” he whispers.

“Pardon?” Clint’s turned towards him; the aids not sharp enough to pick up his response.

“I said it sounds kind of beautiful.” Clint looks a bit taken aback by this.

“Really?”

“Well, if you go by what I was raised on, my immortal soul is marked by sin. No longer a creature of God, when I die my soul will go to eternal damnation and burn for what I have become and the things that I have done.” Bucky says it simply, like the truth he has always accepted it to be from the moment his dead eyes opened. The knife pauses above the deer hide.

“What if you didn’t choose it?” He asks, barely a whisper but Bucky hears him plain as day.

“I didn’t.” A statement of fact that seems to surprise Clint.

“Why would you be punished for something that wasn’t your choice?” and that’s…. a really difficult question to answer actually. Especially when Clint says it with such confusion, like the entire idea is so grossly unjust that he simply can’t conceive of it.

“Because, you always have a choice. I could have let myself die instead of feeding that very first time. Or any thereafter.” He says, giving voice to the same argument he’s been torturing himself with for years now. Clint’s vehement ‘no you couldn’t’ catches him off guard.

“I don’t care what a faith has to say about it,” he bites out, nearly growling, the knife pointing towards Bucky from where Clint has spun around to face him. “I know hunger and mine isn’t half as bad as yours. I know what it is to be afflicted by something you can’t control, another entity injected into yourself that wants to eat and doesn’t care about the consequences. That first day we met, you were practically delirious, and you’d eaten relatively recently. There is no fucking way you could have had a human bleeding near you and resisted the urge to feed, especially not at first. Expecting that of yourself isn’t just unfair, it’s fucking barbaric.” The knife has returned to the carcass, the sounds of flesh rending adding a brutal backdrop to Clint’s words.

The thing is, Bucky hates himself. Has hated himself every day for seventy years and he doesn’t think he’s likely to ever stop.

But Clint doesn’t. More than that, he doesn’t blame Bucky for his circumstances. Not for the choices he was coerced into (though he doesn’t know the full extent, a voice whispers in the back of his mind like poison). It still feels like absolution. He doesn’t know what to say, not when he still disagrees, not when he is still reeling from the shock of this. The rest of the butchering passes in silence, but Bucky doesn’t mind and by the end of it the familiar chore seems to have leeched the residual anger out of Clint. Their dinner is spent in companionable quiet, Bucky feeding lucky from a pile of scraps he’d saved from Clint’s carving.

Clint doesn’t hate him. As he leaves, he keeps playing Clint’s vehement dismissal through his mind, his stagnant heart strangely heavy in his chest.

***

Weeks have passed in the happiest blur Bucky’s experienced since gaining his freedom, until the day he arrives for one of their pre-arranged hunts to find Clint acting oddly. Despite the mild humidity of the slowly warming season, Clint is covered nearly head to toe with the thick scarf he’d worn the day they met wound tight around his neck. He responds to Bucky’s greeting, smiles in response to the small twist of Bucky’s lips that springs up around Clint of its own accord but it’s not enough to dislodge the vague sense of unease telling him that something is _off_. Watching him, it’s obvious that his movements are slightly stiff, and he avoids meeting Bucky’s eyes. In the background, water patters gently from verdant limbs and adds a softly melodic backdrop of small ‘plinking’ noises to the normal sounds of the forest; remnants of last nights rainstorm having swept the world clean and left it vibrant with fresh smells.

The full moon is days off still, and Bucky can’t think of anything that happened between them last time that would have been out of what passes for their version of ordinary, but the change in Clint’s behavior has shaken him and he finds his mind combing through their recent interactions; looking for a way to blame himself. Even Lucky seems a bit subdued, padding softly over to nuzzle at Bucky’s hand instead of running up through the mud and winding around his legs like a giant cat, or jumping up to spatter his shirt with his large paws and accept ear scratches. Instead, he crouches down to meet the dog, stroking soft golden hair until he feels the prickle of eyes on him and looks up to catch Clint staring. He glances away again the moment their eyes meet, making a show of busying himself gathering his equipment. Silence marks the beginning of their journey, their walk through the woods abnormally quiet. The air between them is unmistakably companionable despite the lack of conversation, but Bucky misses the quiet banter that usually surrounds them.

In lieu of it, he walks closer to Clint; stepping towards him to avoid the bushes and knotted roots reaching up to trip him and finding reassurance in the way the other man just lets him wander into his space. He bumps their shoulders when he skirts around a tree, and Clint doesn’t so much as flinch away despite how frigid his skin must be; being near Clint is like basking in the warmth of a banked fire, his body’s furnace of a metabolism gives off much more heat than a human and Bucky can feel it enveloping him even from a distance. Somewhat mollified by Clint’s acceptance of the touches, Bucky relaxes into the shared quiet. The woods are subdued in the wake of the storm, and when Clint turns from the rocky outcropping that marks is his usual hunting spot to clamber up a sturdy oak, Bucky follows. Lucky circles the trunk once, then plunks down into the new grass and hunkers down to nap.

The branch Clint settles on is low and sturdy, (more than thick enough to hold their combined weight) but curves upwards after only a few feet, not leaving much sitting space. Bucky is about to climb higher and find his own branch when Clint shuffles a few centimeters further over and pats the bark next to him expectantly. His raised eyebrow is met with another quick glance in another direction; Clint pulling his bow from over his shoulder and loosely knocking an arrow to avoid his gaze and Bucky settles gingerly next to him.

The space is cramped, and despite his best efforts to make himself small it leaves them sitting close. Clint has to lean back against another limb to keep his wide shoulders from scrunching Bucky up into the trunk, and their legs brush from knee to thigh when Clint’s starts swinging back and forth in the open air. His leg and side are practically on fire and Bucky takes a moment to marvel at the ease with which Clint allows him into his space, as though the danger of the action is simply lost to him. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t care. More baffling still is the possibility that Clint simply trusts Bucky not to hurt him and he doesn’t quite know what to do with that, not when he doesn’t fully trust himself. The closeness feels like an apology; Clint letting Bucky near to make up for the words he doesn’t seem quite capable of sharing.

Slowly, the forest begins to wake around them. Birds stretch their wings and take flight to find water. Squirrels scurry down trunks to ferret through the grass and exposed roots, two young ones chasing each other around the next tree over, spiraling up the trunk and launching themselves one after another from a long branch to continue their play in an adjacent tree. A bird lands above them, seemingly unconcerned with their presence, cleaning its beak on the bark beneath its tiny feet. The forest is damp, warmer than when he first appeared in this place. It lends an earthier tone to the smells drifting towards them, but even with the loam and moss and animals saturating the air, Bucky’s senses are pervaded by the encompassing presence of Clint.

The sensation of the bark beneath his thighs fades into the background in favor of his skin tingling where it can sense Clint’s residual heat. A new stipe has appeared along his shoulders where Clint has stretched an arm out to steady himself against the tree and despite the several inches of open air separating them, Bucky feels it like a burning band. He can hear cloth scraping against the bark as Clint’s leg swings, fibers catching on the jagged wood, beneath the sound of his breathing. Finally, the cacophony of his beating heart drowns out all other sounds. He smells like cheap soap, like the woodsmoke warming his home, he smells of the earth and not unlike a human but with something wild underneath. Bucky smells the traces of dried blood beneath his fingernails, the loam his boots disturbed clinging to the soles. He smells the blood singing just beneath the surface of his skin and as the ever-present hunger howls in response Bucky thinks he’s getting too comfortable with this, with Clint, with being near him and letting down his guard like this, because what _if_?

What if Bucky hurts him? What if he cuts himself on one of Bucky’s bad days and he just can’t stop himself? God, what if he kills Lucky? And even if this miracle keeps going and he keeps his iron will clamped firmly in place and stays ‘vegan,’ never hurts either of them, what happens if the organization catches up? Bucky is dangerous enough in his own right, but even a mere association with him will put Clint’s life in danger if the organization tracks himself or Nat near here. The amount of ways this can go spectacularly wrong are staggering.

Clint’s knee bumps purposefully into his and he startles slightly, looking over to find Clint staring off into the middle distance, presumably scanning the forest for prey and to all appearances not paying any mind to Bucky whatsoever. “You get really still when you’re overthinking something” he mutters the first words of the day, far too quietly for anyone but Bucky to hear. The aids are present today, but they aren’t strong enough to pick up Bucky’s whispers and Clint still seems determined to avoid looking at him so lip reading is out.

He wonders how much Nat would laugh if he asked her to get him a few books on sign language. Probably a lot, he thinks, but it might be worth it. In lieu of another option, he bumps Clint’s knee back, joining him in scanning the forest and basking in his warmth.

The day yields a generous haul and they each have a carcass on their way back, Lucky’s spirits seem to have been bolstered, the dog running on in front of them and yipping excitedly at the squirrels. The closeness they shared in their perch seems to have followed them; shoulders bumping as they walk, hands brushing as they shift their respective loads to navigate through narrow trees. As the day unfolds, Clint’s silence has started to feel busier, for lack of a better word, as though he has something to say and has been mulling over the words the entire time. Bucky stays silent, letting him work through it on his own. Once the carcasses are strung Bucky gets to see how much he managed to learn by watching Clint work, cleaning his own animal and thinking back on Clint’s hearty laugh at the acrobatic take-down.

He is full, and warm, spirits light despite the quiet when Clint finally decides to break it. “You’re not what I expected a vampire to be like.” He looks over in surprise, and Clint is still working, face pinched as though the words has slipped out unbidden. Bucky doesn’t really know what to say to that.

“I’m not really like most vampires” he confesses, but he’s curious. “What did you expect?”

Clint huffs, looking back to what his hands are doing though he clearly doesn’t need to; the familiar movements seem to soothe Clint, however, so Bucky sits by and waits him out. When he finally speaks, it is through a smile slightly too wide to be genuine, the levity in his tone feeling forced. “You’re active during the day, for one thing. Have a reflection. You didn’t seem to mind the garlic powder I put on my steak last week.” Buck’s bemused snort finally causes Clint to look over at him, his expression morphing into something difficult to describe; deep undercurrents of emotion shift just below the surface and as Bucky watches the façade slips just enough for him to get the barest glimpse of something hurting, something reaching out almost desperately. “You’re not cruel.” He chokes out, and the emotion thickening his voice has Bucky reaching out to place a hand over Clint’s forearm in a disused gesture of comfort.

Clint looks down with an involuntary wince, pulling his arm in towards himself and away from Bucky’s touch; he snatches his hand back as if burnt, confused. Clint touches him, has initiated contact several times and not once has he seemed bothered by it, why would he be suddenly repulsed by him? But Clint doesn’t look distraught or disgusted, and for a moment Buck wonders if he misjudged his strength (despite the care he’d put forth interacting with Lucky and Clint all week), but that doesn’t seem right either. Clint looks a lot panicked and a little bit in pain, but the eyes fixing Bucky’s own hold no trace of accusation. Curiosity has him reaching out before he thinks better of it.

Bucky blinks, caught off guard by the speed with which Clint dodges his attempt to grasp his hand, his large body shooting up lithely out of his crouch on the tree stump and moving to twist away, out of reach. Unfortunately for Clint, Bucky recovers quickly and despite his superhuman speed, he’s not a match for Bucky. The large hand beneath his palm is scalding and Bucky takes care to keep the grip light, wrapping just tight enough to keep him from pulling easily away. Clint’s fingers are trembling with something that he doesn’t think is anger, the grimace contorting his features speaking more of panic. He tugs at Bucky’s hold, but the grasp has turned to stone, unyielding. Bright golden eyes are fixated on a point just below the hem of Clint’s jacket; Bucky feels a familiar numbness seeping through his core at the mottled blue and purple of bruising spreading out along his forearm, just below the sleeve.

“Who did this to you?” Comes out flat and cold, emotionless as the barren wasteland his mind is swiftly turning into. Bucky doesn’t expect an answer, and Clint doesn’t give him one, but his sharp intake of breath turns into something close to a sob halfway through and he feels his rotten heart breaking.

In the frozen moment that follows, Bucky is reacquainted with a feeling he had thought he left behind him; rage, pure and cold as the fury of a winter storm chases away the warmth he has been cultivating, tearing at him with gale force winds and turning him to ice. A single bruise on Clint’s skin has managed to inspire what the handlers had spent years and years trying to cultivate in Bucky Barnes to no avail. It leaves him stranded without a precedent to measure the sensation against. He registers the world dropping away from him one detail at a time as his focus draws down to little more than the discoloration. The fury of the dead is a thing of renown, known as they are for holding grudges long past the span of mortal lifetimes, carrying a torch that burns like frost bite and waiting for the moment to satisfy their revenge. For the first time, Bucky touches the edge of that malevolent compunction.

Suddenly he is left blinking at empty air, Clint wrenching his hand free with a strength Bucky hadn’t known the man possessed to pace away and put some distance between them. When he finally turns to face Bucky again, his arms are crossed in what is probably meant to be a defensive gesture, looking miserable. This is the wildest Bucky has ever seen him, standing off against him like a cornered animal, a full body flinch his response to an aborted attempt to reach out again. Blue eyes are feverishly bright, darting around every nook of the clearing, the primal brain hunting for a way out.

The air is musty, thick with humidity and the musty smell of wet bark and fallen leaves. Tracks from the previous evening are all but washed away, only the barest thread left behind to indicate the traveling of animals, and now that he is looking for it, Bucky picks up the faintest trace of something… new. Not quite human, not quite wolf; a strange blending of wet dog and tobacco tainting the area surrounding Clint’s home, nearly imperceptible after the rain and certainly not strong enough to follow. Bucky hasn’t looked away from Clint’s eyes, blue shinning with more than just supernatural light as he stands there trying to tamp down on whatever it is he must be feeling, and this is not the time for questions Bucky wants selfish answers to, but he is lost; the only solution he knows involves following the thin trail and ending it in bloodshed.

“You look like you’re planning to kill somebody.” The soft tenor startles him out his reverie, his attention snapping back to Clint’s face, etched with worry and a tiny bolt of fear where he is slowly curling in on himself as if half-expecting a blow. Fear of Bucky, he realizes with a jolt. And suddenly he gets it.

Bucky’s seen the look in Clint’s eyes on his own face enough times to be familiar. He remembers being in pain, humiliated, powerless. Every source of limited interaction was equally able, and likely, to offer injury as it was to offer kindness. It was the kind of constant senseless back and forth that characterized torturers. And abusers, the killer in his hind-brain hisses. After long enough of knowing nothing else, you start to accept it. Worse, you begin to blame to common denominator; yourself. The man facing him right now is preparing to be hurt again, because Bucky has been safe so far, has been good _so far_. Which means the other shoe is just outside his field of view, waiting to drop.

‘I’m not like them (whoever they are)’ dies on his tongue, because the truth is Bucky is no stranger to cruelty, to violence and blood and killing in the name of something he never once believed in. He isn’t good, or safe, or any other thing that Clint should be opening himself up to in any way. The best thing Bucky could do for him is walk away and wipe his existence from this small part of the world, passing out of Clint’s life like a shade and fading just as easily into his memory. If he were kinder, perhaps he’d be able to manage it.

“I fell from a train.” He says instead, selfishly selfless as he prepares to lay himself bare.

-Tbc


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The gaping maw of the train car had back-lit Steve, the stark black of his silhouette all Bucky could see as he plummeted through the razor winds to certain death… and then suddenly a shadow passed into the tunneled remnants of his sight. A shadow with gleaming teeth, the smile of a nightmare cut across a death-pale face."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ran away from me just a bit. Everything framed, stretching nicely over five chapters as opposed to three.

War was every bit as despicable as Barnes had expected it to be.

Europe was in the thrall of both winter and wartime, snowfall and bombings equally likely in every nightly forecast. Food was scarce for servicemen and civilians alike, supply chains under constant barrage from anyone and everyone trying to stay alive for just one more day. His unit had been in the trenches for months, both literally and figuratively, and were pushing inland through the grotesque ruin of rural areas when something even more sinister than the axis powers began to well up out of the darkness.

It crept on slow, snatches of movement out of the corner of the eye, just too fast to be human, (to be believed). Calls and noises in the night. Shadows that seemed to stare back at you, filling the long hours of midnight watch with a dreadful unease that had nothing to do with the empty buildings and imminent danger of the enemy. All chalked up as nothing more than stress-induced hallucinations.

Until people started going missing.

There was no gunfire, no bloody trail, no sign of struggle; just a quiet void where someone had been breathing, only moments before. The trudge north was grueling even by the Army’s standards and moving during the day meant battling their way through pockets of resistance, rag-tag groups of axis stragglers and the occasional armed ‘civilian’ that may not have spotted them at night, but it was worth the risk. However cruel the opposition might have been, the fear they inspired didn’t hold a candle to the blood-curdling terror of whoever or whatever _it_ was stalking them through the nights. Lack of sleep can’t be sustained forever. Every man was past their limit and sinking farther fast.

Bucky would like to say he put up a fight when his time came, but the honest truth was that by the time he’d registered the danger, it had simply been too late.

Hydra, it turns out, took to Hitler’s open-minded approach to the occult like a necromancer to an open grave. The world Bucky had known was turned inside out; the curtain drawn back to reveal monsters walking ‘round in the shapes of men. Hardly a day had passed before the miracle that was Steve Rogers barreling through a desolate facility liberated him from what was sure to be his conversion to their unholy ranks. By some divine grace, it seemed, the bulk of his unit was _alive,_ and they banded together beneath a new shinning leader; bound close by a primal fear of things unspoken, things they hardly felt safe attempting to remember.

Bucky still felt them on the fringes of his perception, late at night when he couldn’t sleep and the woods or buildings around them were ghostly silent: hunting. The larger-than-life presence of the Howling Commandos and his old friend were enough to keep them at bay, it seemed, until…

The gaping maw of the train car had back-lit Steve, the stark black of his silhouette all Bucky could see as he plummeted through the razor winds to certain death. Fresh snow pillowed the fall more than he’d expected, but none the less it left him irrevocably broken; ribs cracked and punctured his lungs, legs bent out at impossible angles, his spine crunching sharply against what felt like jagged rocks beneath the drifts. Pain was distant from him in that moment, shock and the other-worldly cold pervading every physical sense as the train, and Steve, presumably barreled onward without him; too far above the snowy air for him to see. Vision slowly faded around the edges, black creeping inward with the cold claiming his shattered limbs… and then suddenly a shadow passed into the tunneled remnants of his sight. A shadow with gleaming teeth, the smile of a nightmare cut across a death-pale face.

Being drug through snow by the back of his flak vest, mangled limbs twisting about at every shift int the terrain, was every bit as miserable as one might imagine, until Bucky finally succumbed to unconsciousness. Even still, what followed was decidedly worse.

Pain was the first thing Bucky registered. Fire coursing through his veins and lighting every nerve, scorching every synapse, every cell. Beyond the pain there was nothing; a black hole where sensation should have been, darkness and void and absolutely no distraction from his agony. Slowly, year later it seemed, the flame receded from his limbs, pooling inward to a ball of agony in his chest a thousand times worse than a heart attack as he struggled to breathe, until finally… the pain abated, and he was left in silence. In perfect stillness. It took a long time for Bucky to register that his heart had stopped, while his mind kept ticking over.

Hunger had been a constant companion to Bucky Barnes, a child from a large family in a young America, and a soldier in a barren landscape. Hunger in this new version of himself was an entirely different animal. There was no hollow sensation beneath his ribs, no feeling of his stomach turning hollow before nausea and cramping set it. It could not be ignored or pushed to the back of his mind. This hunger _possessed_ him, crept into his bones and took over what was left of his mind. It stole his capacity for thought, consumed his senses and focused them razor-sharp on his one and only desire _to feed_, to slake his thirst, to make it _stop_ if only for a moment.

And they knew it.

Hunger was the yoke, the whip, the leash that the Organization used to tame their new recruits; changed into the undead and left to fester in dark cells until they were mindless with it. There was no other torture needed, no mind control, no serum or shocks or threats required. Only the driving force of their own hunger. The denial of food. And once food was finally presented, well… Bucky remembers blacking in to glimpses of a corpse hanging limp in his arms. A young girl who couldn’t have been more than 14, in a soiled yellow dress with a gash ripped into her throat by an animal. The horror in her dead eyes would never leave him, the first in a long list of ghosts staring over his shoulders and burdening him with guilt.

And so it went.

A creature that had once been Bucky hungered in the dark and did not sleep or feel or live.

The handlers would descend to drag them from the cage, point them towards a target, collect them from the wreckage of their aftermath.

They ‘trained’ with others eventually, vicious bouts that often ended in permanent death for one or both parties.

Time was meaningless in a world that revolved around hunger with no rhyme or reason to the timing of ‘missions,’ but slowly the world seemed to change around him. He barely had the presence of mind to register much of his surroundings if the details did not specifically pertain to his mission or his targets, but small things filtered in regardless. New fashions adorned the corpses he left littering hallways and floors. Cars were significantly faster, sleeker, more challenging to catch up to and rip the howling humans from. Lights permeated nighttime scenes, sometimes in the form of enormous moving pictures.

It had to have been decades before the handlers began to integrate him with others; Bucky distinguishing himself as a particularly useful asset and rising from the ranks of his fellow mindless beasts. Assignment as a ‘second’ was usually the highest rank to which low caste soldiers such as himself could climb, though the asset did not mark the occasion. Pride, or indeed any other sense of personal accomplishment, were lost to him. Obedience and hunger were all that remained.

Unlike the soldiers, who were targets of opportunity (stolen from battlefields, those fallen through the cracks of society, people who would not be missed), firsts were raised from birth to be agents of the organization. If they survived the process and passed their final test, they would be ‘gifted’ with undeath. As such, the firsts were terrifyingly competent, and more than capable of monitoring an additional asset in the field.

His first was named Natasha.

Their relationship was meant to be one of service; a tool and its master. Communication beyond the minimal required for the task at hand was frowned upon.

Natasha, however, had learned well the limitations of the organization’s watchfulness. In the protected darkness of sewers, the comforting isolation of mountain tops and winter storms, in basements strewn with corpses (the _truly_ dead the only possible witnesses), Natasha _whispered_.

It was an excruciating process, regaining a sense of self. Natasha was both gentle and relentless, offering small observations, asking questions, sharing her opinions and forcing him to slowly start redeveloping his own. Years passed in a blur of bloodshed and changing scenery, and with her steady influence Bucky began to _think_. To _remember_.

The moment he became self-aware enough to understand the horrors he had committed (atrocities that left him marooned on a bleak island, in his own personal sea of blood and gore) is the most painful he remembers. Natasha had been forced to invent a few minor complications that kept them in the field until she could coax him out of the mire of pain and self-loathing long enough to pass as the mindless dreg he was expected to be when they returned.

Nat considered his self-hatred a ‘work in progress’ to this day, but as an asset he had managed to come to terms enough to at least begin to learn from her. Tracking, hand-to-hand combat, evasion (from other creatures of the night, as well as the rapidly evolving technology of modern man), rifles and handguns and knives of any type. Russian; the proper language not just base commands or phrases picked up from eavesdropped conversation. They were beyond successful, outclassing fellow asset pairs and gaining themselves a higher volume of assignments coupled with reduced oversight.

They were trusted to be autonomous.

They were exactly where Natasha had wanted them to be.

Their opportunity had presented itself in the form of a solo operation, requiring significant travel to an area void of other operatives. The mark was irrelevant, some government official the likes of which no one would either miss or severely suffer under; the isolation was key they had been waiting for.

Breaking away from the Organization was almost embarrassingly simple in hindsight. They put their faith in obedience to a fault, and Natasha had been the _perfect_ chameleon.

A tiny part of himself had hoped that returning to America would feel like ‘coming home,’ but it was simply too different. He was too different, no longer the young red-blooded American warfighter he had once been. But it was safe in a way he hadn’t felt since leaving Brooklyn (which had everything to do with the company, and little the landscape).

Natasha was his bloody guardian angel, he the ruthless hell hound by her side heels.

The pair made landfall in a sleepy town in Maine, departing the ship and leaving behind stories of ghosts and haunted decks like something out of Dracula (they had eaten as little as possible on the voyage, but lives had none the less been lost, corpses gifted to the sea). Forested paths had instantly called to Bucky, a silent siren song lulling him away from humanity at large and offering his broken soul a modicum of peace in which to finally mourn his own passing. Nat had taken to a life of vigilantism like a fish to water, haunting the streets at night and drawing would-be predators into her web like the spider she was. Natasha, surprisingly, had a very developed (if unique) sense of morality. She had always felt a twinge of regret at the short lives she had snuffed out like a candle flame because she had been ordered. But the ones who fell outside her moral code she condemned herself. She cleansed the shadows of actual or would-be murderers, rapists, tormentors of the human world, for whom she felt not one drop of remorse.

Faced with freedom after so long, Bucky had wanted to savor it. His choice to avoid killing was not an altruistic one (Bucky Barnes had had a sizable body count to his name long before he had died), but rather a form of self-discipline. He resisted because he could. He suffered because it was his choice. He reveled in the freedom of making it, every single day.

And so it went, two monsters walking different sides of the same path like the opposing faces of a coin, independent yet inseparable.

***

Lucky had been a good sport, laying patiently at Clint’s feet and appearing for all the world to be listening attentively to Bucky’s un-life story, head cocking this way and that when he had paused to struggle with his words. The man himself hadn’t moved so much as a muscle since the tale began, arms crossed over his chest like he was holding in a wound, fingers digging into his biceps in a way that must be painful, white-knuckled and snarled up like claws. Around them, the forest continues to be completely unconcerned with the way Bucky’s personal world has frozen. Animals play in the underbrush, breeze rustles through the trees, the evening sunlight fades and spreads its bloody tendrils through the wispy clouds above them.

Slowly the tension ebbs from Clint’s frame, like delicate frost thawing in the first rays of a lazy spring morning. The frown lines cutting ravines into his face dissipate and though he still looked cast adrift, he was meeting Bucky’s eyes again. He hunted there for familiar game; hatred, uneasiness, fear, but none were present. Clint was looking at him like possible refuge in a storm, one last low-hanging branch for which he could make a grab before plummeting over the edge of the waterfall.

Bucky casts around his empty mind for something, anything, to say but the words seem to have drained out of him; he had plumbed the darkest reaches of himself and turned out the skeleton closets. All that was left now were series of cavernous halls, empty cells whose doors swung listlessly on their hinges. After baring your soul, offering anything less seems meaningless. So he waits, and watches Clint, and listens to Lucky forage through the soft new grass, and watches Clint some more as the man slowly defrosts before his very eyes.

Apparently, he isn’t the only one for whom words seem to be inadequate, because he certainly doesn’t receive any; just a hand, devoid of fear, reaching out and Bucky latches onto it like the lifeline it is. He has to remind himself not to crush Clint’s hand in his anxious haste.

The cabin is quiet that evening, a silent meal before a crackling fire as they sit together. Clint is still, but it is the kind of stillness of deep water; glossy smooth finish belying the tumultuous currents raging just beneath. It is a deluge of information, Bucky knows, that Clint is slowly combing through. Large rainfall having disturbed the topsoil and swept loam from the bottom of his inner lake; he has to wait for the new solution to balance, assimilate, the dust to settle back to the bottom.

When the silence finally breaks, Clint has to repeat himself; not because Bucky hadn’t understood the words, it was just so far the opposite of anything he’d been expecting that he must have misheard. Except that he hadn’t. Which, really, he shouldn’t be that surprised at anymore, that Clint manages to ignore every one of his expectations.

Walking home that night is a surreal experience, the quiet of the forest matching the quiet in his mind. He had expected worse; to be torn up and bloodied raw on the inside as though physically reliving the events he had recounted. Instead he feels hollow, emptied out in a not entirely unpleasant way, vacancy signs in the windows of his darkest fears. He’d drug them into the light and before his very eyes Clint had banished them with little more than a glance, burnt to ashes and scattered away like vampires of legend in the bright sunlight of a smile.

***

Nat’s not in when he returns to their nook, and he settles down on the old mattress to wait out the night, gazing through the treetops at the stars and falling into something of a trance; the closest they can come to sleep, but a state Bucky himself has rarely experienced the peace of mind to achieve.

He was drifting so deep that the quiet greeting hours later didn’t even startle him. He was too used to Natasha to find her presence threatening, however suddenly it had appeared. She stopped at his lack of response and he could feel her eyes on him, assessing, always calculating. Analytical was too mild of a word for the way Natasha looked at the world; her gaze deconstructed and rearranged it endlessly, turning every piece at all angles and looking for anything she may have missed, trying to understand and, ultimately, outmaneuver.

Right now, that surgeon’s scalpel mind is dissecting his posture, the quality of his expression, the lack of tension in his frame. She reads his body language like a map. “What has you so pleased?” She asks, settling into their chair with her latest book. The scent off coffee lingers in her clothes and hair, remnants of the mortal world she’s haunting following her into their little world like an aftertaste. They aren’t looking at each other, but he can practically feel her eyebrow raising at him as he smiles, unable to repress the happiness he feels that she is right, he is pleased, and the reason couldn’t be better. That he made a connection. That for now, he is more than just a miserable scrap of existence refusing to pass on.

The smile is almost painful as it cuts across his face, but he couldn’t repress it is he tried.

“I have a date” he whispers into the darkness.

The snort and sharp smack of a book landing on his chest do not surprise either of them. The quiet laughter welling up from beneath the pages, however, manages to surprise them both.

-tbc


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Bucky longs for a world that is lost to him; not because he can’t go back, but because his ability to experience it as he once did, to be a part of it, has been stripped away. And now he is going to the movies. Presumably in a town, with people and screens and fast cars and everything anathema to the world he’d known. A world that was gone. But this time the new world would have Clint in it, warm and bright and by his side."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *see end for notes and warnings.

Your senses change when you turn. The smell of a person becomes less about their cologne or perfume and more about the blood singing beneath their skin. The heart beating beneath their fragile breastbone drowns out their words. The small thrill of fear they feel in response to your presence connects to something primal; you feel a spike of adrenaline as instinct tunes into the presence of a predator and their conscious mind becomes wary and tense for reasons they don’t understand. Bucky longs for a world that is lost to him; not because he can’t go back, but because his ability to experience it as he once did, to be a part of it, has been stripped away.

Even if his senses were unaltered, the world simply wasn’t the same now as it had been 70 years ago. He hasn’t been into a town in America since they arrived on her shores, and the difference in New York had been staggering. The streets were black, light and moving screens cluttered every corner, cars were louder, faster, everything was far more vibrant than the muted world fading with his memories. He didn’t want to face it, and so he’d shut it out.

And now he is going to the movies. Presumably in a town, with people and screens and fast cars and everything anathema to the world he’d known. A world that was gone. But this time the new world would have Clint in it, warm and bright and by his side. Despite his trepidation, Bucky had barely hesitated to accept the offer. He had a sneaking suspicion that he would even enjoy it, so long as Clint was with him.

***

“So, _Natasha_.” Clint forms the syllables slowly, trying to mimic Bucky’s pronunciation through an American accent and failing. “Do you think she would mind my stealing you away tomorrow night?” Despite the light tone, the question has a heaviness to it that makes Bucky pause, wishing not for the first time that he had more of Nat’s skill with dissecting words, understanding the meaning underneath the surface. The piercing blue eyes are riveted on his face, more intently than a simply lip-reading would require. It feels like Clint is watching for a reaction, body language slightly guarded, and if Bucky wasn’t mistaken, he would say that Clint seemed almost… jealous.

The notion is so foreign to Bucky that he isn’t sure how to respond. On the one hand, Natasha is like a sibling. On the other, the idea of Bucky being the target of someone’s affections to the point of garnering their jealousy, let alone that someone being _Clint_, he simply couldn’t wrap his head around it. So, he latched onto the concept he could fathom.

“Natasha is a sister to me. And I am the kid brother who makes her life far more difficult. She isn’t my keeper.” He adds for good measure, just to make sure he gets the point across.

Clint looks pained at that, smiling in a such a way that the sorrow almost overshadows his relief. Yet again, the reaction isn’t what he’d been expecting. And yet again, Clint shrugs off his melancholy with a speed and strength that leaves Bucky reeling, breezing past the topic before he has the chance to so much as formulate a question. “Come to the movies with me.”

He is halfway through dissecting the complicated expressions that had marred Clint’s animated face briefly, a question just on the tip of his tongue, but what comes out instead is a startled “what?” His hearing has been perfect since his death, but he simply couldn’t have heard that right. Clint repeats himself slowly, like speaking to a child, the vibrant smile marking each of his words with mirth.

“Clint, I don’t think that’s a great idea.” He’s thinking of crowded theaters, closed spaces surrounded by humanity. Fifty helpless people trapped in a small room with thick walls and a real-life monster. He is panicking almost before the mental image manages to solidify, mostly because he can feel himself fighting to say _yes._ Being sensible seems so overrated when the alternative is time spent with Clint. Time with a Clint who is possibly jealous of Natasha. Who wants to spend time with him in that same enclosed space despite listening to the dark, bloody faerie tale of Bucky’s life just hours before.

Clint seems to sense the indecision. “Oh, come on. You’ve resisted ripping my throat out for weeks,” he throws out like a challenge. “This will be cake. We’ll get you gorged on blood first if it makes you more comfortable, and the theater I like is old anyway, not a lot of people show up to their horror nights, which is their loss, but it’s good for you and me. You’re going.” With casual conviction. Like resisting killing someone is somehow an accomplishment. As though he’d already said yes.

“Clint…”

“Nope, tomorrow night. I wanted you to come with me anyway. I’m driving, be here at 4? Actually, is your ‘friend’ going to need to give me the shovel talk before I take you to a movie?” The shovel… what? Did he just offer to meet Nat? Bucky is lost, staring across the table at this beautiful crazy person who seems to think that taking a vampire on a date into public is a good idea. Is there a world in which this makes sense to someone?

“what?”

“Be here at four, Buck. Dress like normal, you’ll blend in fine. Don’t be hungry.” He grins like it’s an inside joke instead of the difference between a night out on the town, and a massacre. “Be here Barnes” and beneath the bravado those blue eyes are worried and uncertain, like he expects Bucky to say no.

“Okay.” Is past his lips without a conscious thought, reacting on instinct to keep from disappointing Clint. Caution truly thrown to the winds now, Bucky reaches across the scratched tabletop and Clint allows him to carefully take his hand, draw it gently forward. He traces the edge of his sleeve with his thumb, marveling at the warmth beneath his fingers and pointedly avoiding the marks still mottling his skin, just beneath the fabric.

***

The afternoon is cool and wet with impending rainfall, the world waiting expectantly for the large storm brewing up north to hit. Bucky’s spent the morning in the woods, running through the trees and hunting small game even though he isn’t truly hungry, not after the success they’d had yesterday. However, the alternative was to sit in the cave and his constant fidgeting had been driving Natasha up a wall. They don’t carry much with them, Bucky himself has only what can fit in a large duffle bag; but still he found himself pouring through his clothes, switching out shirts, checking himself in a cracked mirror they’d hung. He doesn’t understand why he’s so concerned, it isn’t something that even crossed his mind previously, but he is suddenly conscious of his worn jeans, the old leather of his boots more of a muted gray than black these days, and every shirt he owns is worn and faded. After the third shirt, Natasha put her book down and in no uncertain terms informed him that he would either leave in what he was currently wearing, or she was going to steal his clothes and kick him out of the cave naked. He wouldn’t put it past her.

By the time he draws near Clint’s home, the woods have gone so still it’s like nature itself is holding her breath, and it only serves to make the cottage look warmer and more inviting by comparison. The old truck is out from under the tarp, and Clint is just stepping out of the door as Bucky clears the tree line. He’s dressed nearly the same as always, worn jeans with a thermal top, the only marked difference is a lighter jacket than his usual hunting one, and the mud-caked boots have been exchanged for faded chuck tailors. It looks like they might have been a vivid purple once upon a time. He smells freshly clean, incredible against the backdrop of the charged atmosphere; the smile when he spots Bucky hits like a shock of lightning down his spine. “Hey Buck,” eyes sparking as he takes in Bucky’s faded burgundy shirt, his grey jeans.

Clint jerks his head to indicate the passenger side and hops into the driver’s seat, turning his key in the ignition and sparking a low grinding noise that persists for a few long moments before the engine rumbles to life. Bucky contemplates the handle for a moment, grasping it gingerly and pulling slow, avoiding taking the door from its hinges. He climbs in awkwardly; he’s only ridden a vehicle a half dozen times since coming to America. He and Natasha prefer traveling by foot, it’s faster and less conspicuous. Honestly, it should be faster for Clint as well, but with his aversion to his wolf form and the sentimentality of his grandfather’s old truck… well. Clint throws it into drive the moment the passenger door shuts, and they begin the bumping, rocking journey down the dirt path leading onto the closest country road. They turn away from Waverly, he notices, watching the trees go by and getting used to the noise of the engine.

“What are we going to see?” he asks, a little louder than normal to compensate, hopefully enough for Clint’s hearing aids to decipher. Apparently, it’s loud enough, Clint’s face splitting in an easy grin, but he just looks puckishly at Bucky, and refuses to tell him.

The theater is small and old, kept alive by a few loyal patrons and the stubbornness of the old man who owns it. He must share Clint’s love for horror films: the entire entranceway is plastered with photos, posters, old cardboard cut-outs of classic monsters. There’s a wolf-man guarding one side of the wide staircase leading to the theater, and a Nosferatu replica on the other. He raises a brow at Clint, but the wolf pays the figures no mind, clearly familiar with the space. He buys their tickets, Bucky feeling awkward at not having thought about needing money to buy his own, but Clint just presses the small piece of paper into his hand and ushers them to a small stand where he acquires a large cardboard tub full of popped corn.

The smells are a riot in the building, traces of humanity everywhere, but they are mostly old. Aside from themselves, there are only a couple of other people in the theater and it is relatively easy for Bucky to tune them out, letting their scents blend into the old wood, moldering upholstery and dust. He lets his senses fill with Clint instead, his body warm next to his own, the smell of his hair and skin enough to overpower the less significant people in the room. This is the deepest into civilization he’s been without Nat beside him, but the panic he was expecting is absent. Curiously enough, he trusts himself here, with Clint especially, the control the organization stripped from him slowly returning to his own hands.

The movie, something called ‘the Thing,’ is not about any monster Bucky’s ever seen; an alien organism bent on taking over a group of humans in a frozen landscape. Each time Clint jumps and drops pieces of popcorn, it startles Bucky more than the movie and despite his best intentions, his skin is crawling by the end, but the way Clint seems to drift closer to him as the film progresses is worth the discomfort. The entire experience is a vast departure from his last film; old tents packed full of tired soldiers, filthy beyond recognition and grateful for the chance to sit more so than the prospect of entertainment.

By the time the credits roll, Clint is well into his personal space and practically draped over the armrest, popcorn bucket empty and abandoned on the other side. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact his hand is wrapped around Bucky’s bicep (he has been using it as a stress ball for the last quarter of the film), until the credits roll and he looks down, disentangling himself with a blush the dim lights are unable to hide from Bucky’s keen eyes. “Did you like it?” Clint asks on their way out, after discarding the popcorn bucket in a bin and waving to the old man ushering people out the front doors.

Bucky couldn’t tell you more than the major plot points of the movie, but he could recount with perfect accuracy the exact moment Clint’s heartrate would spike in response to the thriller, the sound of his sharp inhalations of breath, the frequency of the tremors running through his hand and into Bucky when he was surprised.

Overall, he’d enjoyed the moviegoing experience, though perhaps not for the reasons Clint had hoped he would. He looks up into Clint’s bright eyes and fights the urge not to drop his gaze lower, to the bright red of the lips he’d been biting during the monster fights. “Yes, I did.” And if their shoulders brushed the entire way back to the car, it was just the lingering effects of the thriller, to be sure.

The ride back is far louder than the trip into town, Clint going over his favorite parts and filling Bucky in on the ‘science fiction genre,’ explaining some of his favorite movies and going so far as attempting to reenact a few scenes while driving. Bucky’s own imitation of the Thing is enough to keep Clint laughing all the way up his winding dirt drive, both men too absorbed in each other to catch the shapes shifting through trees on either side.

As soon as the vehicle clears the final line of trees, Bucky freezes stiller than a porcelain replica. A figure stands at the door to Clint’s cabin. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Clint’s startled gaze travels from Bucky’s sudden shock to the spot that’s captured his attention and instantly, the brakes slam into place with a curse. The old truck screeches to a halt, complaining loudly at the sudden stop, and in the breathless silence that follows Clint is the stillest Bucky has ever seen him. The echoes of Clint’s thundering heartbeat reverberate through his still ribs with the pain of a phantom limb.

With shaking fingers, he reaches up to kill the engine, the keys left dangling in the ignition and the last gust of air from the old vents carries a new scent over the cloud of ‘Clint’ permeating the vehicle. The stench of fear is palpable, thick and cloying as it taints Clint’s presence and Bucky nearly recoils from the intensity of Clint’s reaction to this _thing_ darkening his doorstep.

In the short handful of seconds that have passed pieces of Bucky’s shattered self have slotted themselves together into a new mosaic he hardly recognizes, but feels right; his instincts slotting neatly into line with his desires. For the first time in longer than he can remember, Bucky and his beast are in agreement as he slides silently out of the passenger door despite Clint’s desperate ‘Bucky, just stay here let me handle this.’

The man before him is average, barely shorter than Bucky and wearing a smarmy grin, every last inch of him from his hair to his body language telegraphs ‘thug’ and Bucky wants to tear his limbs off just for stealing the smile from Clint’s face. Two steps away from the vehicle, he registers the scent of fresh blood, not human, and in the frozen silence of his cavernous chest he feels a hint of fear bleeding swiftly into rage. If he hurt Lucky…

“Hey, Barney.” Clint calls, like this is normal, the fear an unmitigated undercurrent turning his voice alien to Bucky’s ears. He shoots a sidelong glance at Bucky, probably urging him back into the vehicle, but that’s not happening, not with a clear threat presenting itself to Clint.

‘The Target,’ as Bucky has already labeled this creature in his mind, smiles in a way that clearly isn’t friendly, taking a few steps away from the door and pacing to put Clint between them.

“Hey there little bro’,” the target calls, grinning at Clint like he is the butt of an inside joke, reaching slowly into his pocket to fish out a lighter and pack of cigarettes, lighting one up in a move so casual as to be dismissive. “You and your boyfriend have a nice little night on the town? Grab a _bite_ on the way home?” The thing sneers. The emphasis on ‘bite’ is not lost on Bucky, whatever this man’s connection to Clint, he clearly knows what he’s standing in a clearing with. He tosses it out almost like a challenge, as though the knowledge of him somehow makes the reality of Bucky less dangerous.

There is an itch building between his shoulder blades urging him to prove the man wrong.

Clearly the message was also intended as a barb for Clint, who flinched at the word ‘boyfriend’ as though the man had physically struck him. The growing likelihood that this creature is involved with the bruises on Clint’s arms is eating at Bucky’s insides like grave worms, his fists clenched so tight that they screech quietly; two stones scraping together with a titanic force. The noise makes Clint jump again, his panicked eyes darting over his shoulder to where Bucky stands, and he forces himself to relax the grip.

“What do you want?”

The target, ‘Barney,’ puts on an over the top air of offence, miming a knife to the heart. “I don’t need to have an agenda to come drop in on my little brother, do I?” His tone is possessive, the menacing undercurrent suggesting that there was only one way for the question to be answered. When Clint doesn’t respond, Barney takes a step forward and before Clint’s instinctive step back completes half it’s path of travel, several things seem to happen at once.

Bucky steps forward towards Clint, reaching out to grasp his hand and put some distance between him and this man. The moment he moves several shadows coalesce like banks of living fog from the shadows of the underbrush, darting in as fast as Bucky and stopping just as quickly. Bucky freezes, his hand outstretched mere inches from Clint’s as he assesses the new danger; a pack of wolves, overgrown and ugly in the viciousness of their snarling faces, trapping them in a loose half-moon. There are no less than four that Bucky can see, scanning his eyes quickly. He has to assume there are more directly behind him; the nearest leaned forward to snap at him with breath like rotting meat when he tried to turn his head to see.

“Now, now, let’s not get carried away. We just came over to say hello, get to know each other a little bit. If you’re going to take him out, it’s only polite to meet the _family,_ wouldn’t you agree?” Barney’s words and tone seem to have a habit of sending crossed messages. His speech makes it sound like they are here to protect Clint from a monster. If this is the pack living near the town, it’s hardly any wonder why Clint keeps to himself out here. He can’t image the man he’s gotten to know living amongst creatures with this level of menace. Bucky’s certain Clint wouldn’t be any safer left alone with them than he would be in the clutches of a _true_ man-eater.

Clint’s heartbeat is erratic now, thundering out a tense staccato in his panic. The way his body twists around to keep Bucky in his sight makes it apparent the terror isn’t for himself, but rather for Bucky’s own safety. He wishes he could say it wasn’t a valid concern, but six on one with a pack of werewolves is a high order on a good day. Bucky doesn’t know how well he will fare after so long on his vegan diet, but if their intention is to hurt Clint, Bucky’s not going to be able to standby and simply watch.

On the tail end of that thought, Clint’s plaintive “Barney, just leave him alone” gets cut off by a sharp, resounding “_Smack_” and suddenly his poor chances are no longer a factor.

Clint gets hit

Bucky lunges forward like a force of nature, the wolf who had snapped at his hand matching his speed and getting a sharp jab to the jaw for his efforts. The massive body lurches to the side with a sick “crack” and crashes to the ground, dragging up a thick mass of mud and underbrush before a thick tree breaks the momentum, and then lies still.

Before he can properly recoil the second fastest latches onto his hand, trapping his fist in jaws like a vice. He jerks hard, but the bite holds and prevents him from putting the full force of his swing behind the strike that catches the third wolf just below the eye. Nonetheless it is sent rolling through the underbrush, but it’s already shaking its massive head to clear it and getting its legs back underneath before the fourth latches onto his other arm near the elbow.

Another hits his back with the force of a locomotive and sends him crashing to his knees with a snarl, his captors keeping vicious hold of him, just strong enough to prevent him from returning to his feet. The sixth is circling them, and Bucky looks up to find Clint in a headlock from behind, Barney facing him towards Bucky and with a sudden terrible clarity he understands what is about to happen.

What an awful moment to realize how much this man means to him. How miserable to be proven right, that this would only end badly. That these men would take him from Clint simply because he made Clint happy.

The fifth wolf is pacing forward, his yellowed razor fangs flashing in the moonlight, saliva tainted pink with the blood of a recent kill dripping from the gaping maw slowly opening before Bucky and he fights it with everything in him, muscles like solid stone tearing against the steel rebar grip of their fangs and the high pitched screeching of his flesh sliding against their teeth a thousand times louder than nails against a chalkboard.

The other two are at his side in moments, latching onto to his shoulders and with a final soul-rending effort Bucky realizes that he can’t overpower all four of them.

In this last desperate moment, he finds he isn’t afraid. Not that it will all end like this, that his life will be over and the fires of hell his human family taught him to believe in are all that wait for him. In this moment all he can think of is Clint. How he wants more time to be with him. To watch the sunset, the moonrise, the glitter of snow reflecting off his skin. He mourns the life that he will lead alone with these monsters.

He looks up, locking eyes and loosing himself in the hypnotic blue that’s darkening to the purest shade of arctic ice, dark as the ocean at midnight. Even in his desperate fury Clint is the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen, his teeth bared in all their sharp, inhuman glory. The muscles are standing out in his arms like they are trying to break free of his skin as he tears at barney’s hold.

“Settle down, Clint, or you might just change. And you remember how that worked out last time don’t you?” the monster says directly to his ear, his face held just behind Clint’s as he holds onto him through the struggle. “What will it take for you to learn, huh? This pack is _mine_, and no one in it is going to be an abhorrent piece of filth, you understand? I already took your hearing, what is it going to take to cure you of this, hmm?” Clint is snarling now, lost for words and nearly sobbing in his brothers’ grasp. The monster smiles down to address Bucky where he is held kneeling before him in the dirt. “What about his eyes? They’re beautiful, aren’t they? How would you feel, knowing your death would be the very last thing he sees?”

Bucky can’t help his desperate cry as the fifth wolf closes in between them and Bucky’s vision is eclipsed by seemingly endless rows of teeth.

-tbc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Warnings: prejudice, violence, threats of violence, mentions of past abuse, threats of future abuse.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here she is: the final installment!  
Thank you all so much for reading; this took longer than I hoped it would to finish, and your patience is a gift.

In his mind, Bucky has seen his death many times. The infinite possibilities of small actions spread out before him in a delicate spider web of fate, each tracing one small mistake to a different outcome. A step through a door one moment too soon; hitting the deck a moment too late; one comment too far to an irrational handler; one single flash of his scope in the dim landscape as he waited out the axis snipers on long winter nights… and he would have been snuffed out like a candle.

In this world of endless mysteries, Bucky somehow managed to believe that his death would be significant. Revenge for a fallen comrade. A loved one slain at his hands. A silent shadow from the organization he had wronged, sent to silence a lone loose thread. Rival syndicates, blood nemeses of his species, the list goes on. He has enough enemies to keep pace with his sins, and that epic saga continues far longer than he cares to dwell upon.

Not once has it ever entered Bucky’s mind that he would die for love.

As he kneels in the soft earth, his senses overpowered by wet dog and rancid meat, he can appreciate the bitter irony of having failed to learn one lesson: life will always, always, present him with the unexpected. In retrospect being blindsided one last time is probably the most apropos way for his story to end. The maw closes in before him with commendable speed, and Bucky keeps his eyes open: hoping for one last glimpse of Clint as they rip him apart.

In the background of his awareness someone begins to howl. Barney’s laughter echoes with madness around the yard. Suddenly, a vicious roar rends the cool night air and the impressive row of glistening canines snap closed like a prematurely sprung trap, close enough that the grave-damp breath ghosts across his face and covers him with vile bits of slobber. The wolves are just as shocked as Bucky, if not more so; a tremor runs through the firmness of their grasp.

Unfortunately for them, the undead recover rather quickly from shock.

Bucky has an arm free and a hand clamped down over the muzzle at his left shoulder, grinding the bones together with savage force as the animal whimpers and, in its panic, releases its hold. Keeping the same grip, Bucky swings the wolf to his right, slamming its massive body into the two just starting to lunge back in for another hold.

Uninterested in sharing the previous wolf’s fate, the final set of jaws pinning his left wrist release him, their owner stalking back a few steps and Bucky braces for their renewed assault, but it fails to come. They should already be on him. Taking a swift glance around himself, he finds the wolves circling tight; the one he’d managed to grab oozing vile red drips into the grass. They keep their short distance, splitting their attention between Bucky and the spectacle unfolding before him.

Between himself and a furious Barney stands a massive wolf, easily twice the size of the beast it has pinned beneath a monstrous paw, its tattered ears pulled back tight over a furrowed brow, a vicious snarl marring the pale fur of his snout.

Beneath the jagged scars and haphazard fur, Clint’s eyes shine a captivating neon in the darkness.

Mashed into the soggy mud, the pinned wolf thrashes and kicks uselessly at Clint’s hind legs, succeeding only in sinking its face beeper into the muck. Clint barely seems aware of the desperate struggles, his eyes locked unerringly on Bucky as if expecting him to disappear the moment he blinks or looks away. Bucky feels high in a way he hasn’t since the battlefield of the world war; elated with a primal joy at having escaped death for one more day.

For the first time, Bucky feels happy to be unalive, drowning breathlessly in a sea of unnaturally bright blue.

A guttural cry breaks their reverie, a rust-color mass of fur barreling into Clint and toppling him into the mud. Claws the size of boot knives flash in the moonlight as the wolves clash, heads and paws whipping this way and that almost faster than Bucky can follow.

Bucky is moving to intercept when his would-be murderer struggles up from the sludge and lurches, catching him mid-leap and sending them both crashing into the waiting line of skirmishers.

He fights with a furious abandon, fueled by a mad panic that grows ever more desperate with each meaty thud and pained yowl from Clint, every atom of his being urging him to Clint’s side to assist. For the moment none seem willing to interfere with the brothers’ brawl, but he does not want to wager Clint’s life against the werewolves’ sense of honor. All eyes focus on Bucky, clearly bent on preventing his intervention.

The animal in him tells him to give in to blood rage and fight, damn the odds.

The killer built into him knows this is a fight he cannot win; he needs to even the playing field somehow.

The human part left over tells him to run, live, save himself.

What is left of his heart is writhing in agony. If Clint dies…

The thought expands, growing to block out every other emotion with something far more primal than rage, than instinct, than reason. Fear grips him and the broken pieces making up the shattered picture that is Bucky Barnes slot themselves together into something coherent, all of him working towards a common purpose.

Because Clint cannot die. Bucky isn’t going to let that happen.

He takes one final look at Clint, knowing full well that it could be the last time he sees him, and turns to run as fast as his inhuman speed will carry him. Trees rush past in a silver-dark blur, unseen, the last glimpse of Clint burned into his retina: savage and beautiful, bloody and battle-torn in the moonlight, his unearthly eyes gleaming.

The rest of the pack are on his heels in moments, and from the sound of it, Bucky succeeded in luring away all but one of them.

***

Several miles out from the clearing, Bucky begins his obfuscation, diving into the frigid waters of the local river and zigzagging through the banks of thick trees on either side, using his slight advantage in speed to confuse his scent trail as much as possible. From there it’s a game of hide and wait, concealing his presence and letting the group grow frustrated, until they split off to cover more ground.

The first he catches off guard from above, descending from tree branches silent as a ghost and turning the tables on his would-be hunters for a brief, violent moment. They’re fast, help arriving in response to the pained howls before Bucky can do anything permanent, but the myriad of broken bones should keep the beast down for the remainder of the lunar cycle, let alone the fight. He ghosts away into the underbrush, flitting between treetops and banks of shadow as he eludes them anew.

The cat and mouse game continues until Bucky stopps to ‘catch his breath,’ taking stock of his flagging stamina.

If he’s honest, he’s lucky he has been able to hold his own for even this long; his limbs are slowly turning leaden as his body burns through its meager stores of energy. It’s only a matter of time before his strength is sapped entirely. Already he can feel a numbing tingle creeping into his fingertips as he crouches over the hulking form he has hidden roughly beneath an overgrown outcropping of rock. So far, he has only been able to kill one wolf, catching him by surprise in a moment of isolation beneath the trees.

Moonlight is washing across the matted forest floor in gentle waves, shifting back and forth with the canopies shaking in the gentle night breeze, and for a frozen moment the forest is a peaceful place once more. One Bucky finds reassuring and familiar. Until the quiet takes on a twisting sense of menace and Bucky realizes he has been still too long; the lethargy overtaking his body is seeping into his mind. Sensing his vulnerability, the wolves closed in around him; had in fact managed to box him in in his moment of inattention.

The growl permeating the quiet gives them pause, ears twitching as they stop their advance to scan the woods around them. Bucky pauses as well, frozen still as marble where he sits crouching upon the earth. Overhead, there is the sickening crack of snapped bone, and a dark mass sails through the air above him; falling from the top of the outcropping to the forest floor below and digging up the soft topsoil.

The hush returns like the breathless pause between crashing waves; the forest eerie in its stillness as the largest wolf creeps forward to nose at the unresponsive body.

A boom cracks around them, echoing off the trees as it rumbles through the forest like thunder; the loud concussive drum beat of an unstoppable force meeting an unmoving object and persuading it to change its mind. Bucky doesn’t take his eyes off the nearest wolf, but from the corner of his eyes he sees it: a streak of crimson tearing through the moonlight with efficient grace. Another wolf crumples into the welcoming embrace of dead leaves, likely never to move again. The final wolf hesitates, struggling between fight or flight as animal instinct clashes with a human mind and by the time the desire to run wins out it is too late; she is upon them.

Natasha is a force of nature. The world seems to twist itself out of shape to accommodate her, to make room for the impossibility of her within it. Most likely the gray never sees her coming, except perhaps for the reflection of red hair in Bucky’s eyes, before their neck snaps beneath her tiny hands.

Relief is perhaps too mild a word for what Bucky feels in that moment, as the last adversary falls to the forest floor in an anticlimactic churning of leaf dust and dry peat. The motes are dancing fancifully in the rays of the moon in her wake as Nat seems to blink out of existence and reappear at his side, icy fingers snatching his head and twisting it around as he submits to her inspection; lets her press the tiny daggers of her nails against his skull and down his arms, assuring herself that he is real, alive, recoverable.

Then she digs them in for real in Natasha language for worry, and he winces more at having scared her than in response to the pain. There is fury in her eyes when he meets them, but he cannot rest yet, cannot pause to calm her down.

“Clint” he gasps out, and she gets it. Her face stays still as a sculpture, but the worry in her eyes melts back into rage once more and she drags him up and steadies him on his feet.

“You over did it.” She chides, catching his elbow for the second time as he nearly lists over. “Let me go” and only then does he realize that he’s holding her hand; clutching desperately in response to the panic rising within him. He can’t run, can’t get back to Clint, has no way of knowing if the man will be alright when he returns. If he is even still alive.

“Let me go Barnes. I will find him.” He knows, rationally, that she is right; that he is in no condition to be of any use to anyone; that she can run faster than him on a good day, which this categorically isn’t. She is Clint’s best chance. Through an iron resistance, he forces his fingers to let go, and with a last lingering glance she is gone; nothing but the cool night breeze filling in her wake.

Slowly her scent dissipates, and he is surrounded by nothing but the quiet forest. The bodies around him are motionless. Natasha clearly expects for him to wait for her return. He steels himself against her inevitable ire and makes him way back towards the small cottage, jogging at what he tells himself is a reasonable pace (still faster than an automobile) only needing to catch himself on a tree twice before he starts to make out the familiar paths he walked so recently with Clint, leading him back home.

***

Seattle is a breath of fresh, frigid air coating his lungs, cleansing him from the inside. The city connects with him in ways no human place ever has, his vampire self feeling as at home and at ease here as he had once felt in Brooklyn, what may as well be eons ago now. Currently, Bucky spends his days writing, loitering around cafes and enjoying the scenery. The human life bustles past him, never quite touching: as close as he ever wants to get. Snow is falling in fat flakes, sticking to coats and scarves and railings, slicking the already frozen streets and glittering in the hair of passerby before their heat can melt it.

One of a million tiny details he never fails to catch, and they never seem to notice; the icy crystals cling to his hair and hands and form fragile colonies until he moves to brush them away before he accumulates more than is negligible. He has forgotten on occasion, too engrossed in people watching or lost in a running thought to move more than keeping his pen to fresh paper requires, and Nat inevitably wanders out, swaps his frigid cup of coffee for a steaming mug and gives him a brisk dusting off.

Steam rises from more than his cup now, the sewers belching warm air in huge wafting plumes from manhole covers, the combined puffs of breaths of crowds rushing past the sidewalk and the hot exhaust of cars whipping past beyond them all add their curling moisture to the winter air; far too dry and cold for even their combined efforts to humidify.

The perpetual cloud cover should be depressing, he thinks, but somehow Bucky barely manages to notice them past a fleeting appreciation for the artful way they wisp and flow in an everchanging tapestry of whites and greys and, sometimes, hints of blue and gold. He supposes he should miss warmth and golden hues, the brilliant blues of the open sky, but never has he spared a moment of regret for their loss.

In the gloomy malaise of storm-dark days and starless nights Bucky Barnes basks in the warm glow of his own personal sun, stares into the endless blue of eyes more enthralling than any winter morning.

In the churning lifeblood of this city Bucky Barnes sits like a stone, still and patient as they flow past him, life passing by and he its silent witness. Clint Barton insinuates himself into the very heart of it, gregarious and brighter than he ever was stifled by his home. Clint explores the city, finds the dark and light alike, the hidden gems of small shops and uncharted eateries. He chats and smiles and lives more fully than the thousands of souls around him, burning hotter than their combined warmth ever will.

Bucky would not go so far as to say that it had all been worth it. The lives lost at his hands are irreplaceable and his life alone will never be an adequate replacement. He certainly doesn’t deserve what he’s been given. This unbelievable man, who lives with everything he has and who, for reasons Bucky will never understand, loves him. With every crevice of his massive heart.

As if on cue, a blond head taller and brighter than the mass of hooded figures around him, rounds the street corner and the Bucky spots the tell-tale parting of the seas that precedes him; a clear path melting to make way for Lucky, no doubt dragging Clint forward by his worn leash. Like clockwork, Nat swans out one door, drops two fresh cups into onto the frosty surface of the tabletop, clears away a mug that’s just begun to glass over, and sweeps back through the opposite entryway without ever breaking step (Bucky does not miss the way the young barista pauses halfway through wiping down a counter to watch her boss’ gracefully efficient glide).

His attention snaps back to the table just as two massive, sopping wet paws launch into the air, heading directly for his face. “Lucky, no!” and Clint leans down to wrap the menace up in a reverse bear-hug, overbalances, tips them both over and momentarily Bucky is engulfed in a mass of writhing, laughing, wet furball. Lucky’s in there somewhere too.

The laugh is contagious, taking over his body like the world’s most delightful curse, warming his soul as Clint’s large hands warm his face; his boyfriend leaning down to kiss him through the remaining chuckles, Lucky’s wet tail beating out a delighted staccato against his sodden pant leg, but he can’t bring himself to care. Clint settles into his chair finally, grinning while sheepishly apologizing for the mess they made of his clothes but the wet hardly registers against the molten happiness seeping through him.

Through the stormy afternoon, Clint sips his tea, and pets his dog, and watches people passing by, rambles on about his day, and just generally fills the world in until the grey mist fades into the background. Bucky’s world is bright gold, vivid blue, a vibrant laugh, and a pervading warmth that suffuses his entire being. Clint makes the world feel like home.

-the end.


End file.
